Tarot

I just finished another rousing victory in solitare. I think I've gotten worse at the game since I started playing sometime this semester when I had no work. That might be because my skill level has decreased, but it is more likely due to a sudden increase in my standards. It is not enough for me to win the game...in order to claim true victory, I have to win WELL. A perfect game would be one that ends with four aces on top and full columns of cards (even better, I suppose, would be no aces and full columns including aces, but I hardly try for that). The closer to this the better, and I judge each completion based on what card is the highest card up top when the game is won. If there are three aces and a four, then it's a four...there's no averaging. This means that during games I will start to compromise: if I put one deuce up top, I become willing to put the other three up top if it betters my chances of winning. In any case, that game is a minimum level two...it can no longer achieve the coveted title of Level One Victory. Cards may, occasionally, be brought down from the top during a game. If it was convenient to, say, put a three up top early on in the game, but then I needed to join a four to a two, I could bring that three down. I cannot, however, bring cards down without immediate need.

I have to struggle, somewhat, not to find meaning in these games. Solitare, and its more addictive cousin, Minesweeper, bring me into a sort of aggravated Zen state where I feel as if I've found the meaning of my life and the universe in the randomness of the spread. Minesweeper does this more effectively, as it is infinitely more absorbing due to its nature: it is a constant, immediate puzzle. I become absorbed in these games, and I have to convince myself that every aspect is a random function generated by my computer. These patterns are not beautiful fractals. I cannot "sense" what is going to happen...what cards will turn up, how many mines will be adjacent to a specific space. God does not favor me in these games. There is no higher power concerning himself (or herself, I suppose, but my mysticism says him) with my victory ratio. I am not being timed, sent back to my life after just the right number of lost solitare games. Still, the feeling is inevitable. This grand mysticism only heightens my actual atheism. If I can feel divine presence in something so straightforward and artificial as a solitare game, then this feeling is irrational and I can dismiss it from the larger scale notion of "fate."

Although I do--and, wow, do I hate to say it--sort of believe in fate. I kind of can't get around it. I ultimately believe that I will succeed in life, and that belief is based on my faith in fate. Well, fate and the clawing encouragement of others. So many people have expressed confidence in me over the years. They all truly believe that I will do well. I have an incredible urge to be self-defeating, mostly because others seem to believe it is my fate to do great things, and I desperately want to take my fate into my own hands...or at least out of God's. I want to disprove that notion and allow everyone I know to wallow in great disappointment. "Wallow, teachers! Wallow, relatives! Wallow, friends! See how I, a brilliant, competent, semi-mentally healthy woman have failed you all!" And I will not have failed myself, because great things were never really on my agenda. I can still think and write and produce what I need to while living a simple life. God, at times I really, really just want to work at Borders for eight hours a day and live in a crappy apartment in Mount Vernon and hang out with friends and write prose and lyrics and occasionally take pictures of naked men.

Would that be so bad? Would I really be as unsatisfied as everyone says I would? Would I be less satisfied than if I were a lawyer or consultant or some profession that stimulated my intellect and sapped my soul? I'd rather space out for eight hours a day than bill on 12 minute cycles and feel the same stress my father regularly feels. I'll probably take the middle way and do something all right. Mediocrity isn't as glorious as sublime failure, I know, but I think it's enough. I'll go into communications. I'll do well. Perhaps in 10 years I'll be reasonably respected in that field. Maybe I'll write one full-length musical and it will be listenable and amusing but somewhat incoherent and not at all provocative. Maybe I'll make $100,000 a year at my earning peak. Maybe I'll have a few good relationships but never get married. And for the ultimate in half-assedness, maybe I'll carry a child for a nice gay couple I love and get to see the kid on weekends. There would be something horribly beautiful in all of that.